Lesson: Generics

Generics are a built-in language feature that will make your software more reliable. This lesson discusses the following topics:

Introduction

This section explains some common shortcomings associated with non-generic code. Specifically, it shows how certain kinds of bugs will crash an application at runtime, since they are not detectable by the compiler.

Generic Types

This section explains generic type declarations, type variables, type parameters, and type arguments. It also describes the naming conventions that are specific to generics.

Generic Methods and Constructors

This section shows how type parameters can be used to define generic methods and constructors.

Type Inference

This section describes type inference, which enables you to invoke a generic method as you would an ordinary method, without specifying a type between angle brackets.

Bounded Type Parameters

This section describes how type parameters can specify an upper bound that limits the kind of types that can be passed in.

Subtyping

This section describes how generic subtyping differs from non-generic subtyping.

Wildcards

This section continues the discussion of subtyping by describing bounded and unbounded wildcards.

Type Erasure

This section describes type erasure, raw types, and unchecked warnings.

Using Non-Reifiable Parameters with Varargs Methods

This section describes the consequences type erasure has that are related to variable arguments (also known as varargs) methods that use generic types as parameters.